Zimbabwe seems to be a special friend of the South African government, more indulged than others, politically and otherwise.
This emerges again from the leaking of scores of secret State Security Agency (SSA) reports to the Al Jazeera network, which began publishing them last week.
The reports show that the SSA rightly turned down requests from several foreign services, including some in Africa, to spy on their merely political opponents.
Among these were a request from Cameroonian intelligence to the SSA to confirm whether prominent opposition leader Pierre Mila Assoute was in South Africa a month before elections in Cameroon in October 2011 and to discover what he was doing here.
The SSA turned down the request, with one of its senior officials saying: “I do not think that Pierre Mila Assoute has committed any offence which would warrant the State Security Agency to provide information.”
Assoute eventually fled Cameroon into exile. Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982, won those 2011 elections, as he has won all others, by hook or by crook.
The SSA treated Rwanda similarly in 2012 when it signed a memorandum of understanding about intelligence co-operation with Rwanda’s National Intelligence and Security Service (Niss).
The document included the usual, uncontroversial agreements about working together to combat ordinary crime, such as smuggling, illicit immigration, drug trafficking and religious extremism.
But then Niss requested that an extra category be included in the list of crimes or offences that the two intelligence agencies would work together against. This was “genocide fugitives/negationists”.
Perhaps it would have been acceptable to the SSA to help Rwanda try to catch genuine perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis (and some moderate Hutus).
But the word “negationists” obviously rang loud alarm bells. The government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame has made it a crime to deny or negate the genocide and this in effect has meant not accepting his government’s interpretation of it.
And so suggestions that the triumphant Tutsis might also have perpetrated genocide against Hutus after they toppled the Hutu government in the wake of the genocide, have also been prosecuted under the genocide denial legislation.
So the SSA was right to refuse that inclusion in the agreement.
But then there is the Joint Action Plan which the SSA signed with its Zimbabwean counterpart in 2011. It also included mostly innocuous agreements to co-operate in fighting crime, terrorism, etc.
However, it also included, under “Objective 2; To Monitor Activities Aimed at Subverting Constitutional Order”, some very worrying elements. The two agencies agreed to “monitor and exchange information on rogue NGOs and other institutions – the identification, profiling and assessment of NGOs engaged in subversive activities”, including their financing, “the nature of the pressure exerted on the political agenda” and their “undue influencing of policy”.
They also agreed “to identify and neutralise the activities of information peddlers”, and to “monitor and exchange information on media, including social networks”. This would include identifying and profiling “subversive media”.
These agreements have a sinister tone, even if the agreement does not elaborate so that we might know and assess for ourselves what and who they have in mind.
Though this is a mutual agreement, it seems, in effect, to be an agreement by the SSA to spy on Mugabe’s enemies in South Africa. It’s hard to imagine that there are any South African organisations or individuals operating out of Zimbabwe which fit the above descriptions, and which could remotely be regarded as posing any kind of even political threat to the South African government.
But there are quite a few Zimbabwean individuals and organisations operating in South Africa which are politically opposed to Mugabe’s government and don’t feel they can operate freely or safely in Zimbabwe.
Why would the SSA agree to spy on them when it refuses to spy on Cameroon’s or Rwanda’s political opponents?
Maybe further leaks from Al Jazeera will help to answer this question.
* Peter Fabricius is Independent Media’s foreign editor.
Cape Times